Mr. Kieran Stafford:

I am a volunteer with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. I come from Tipperary and I have a lot of on-the-ground experience. I live in an urban area but I operate in both urban and rural areas. I have a national role in my capacity as national vice-president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

In response to the questions from Deputy Ó Cuív, my experience is that people living in the country would tend to be happier than those living in the town. However, if one looks at one of the themes of our annual appeal this year, that one event can quite often tip an individual or a family into poverty, that is felt more harshly by those living in rural areas than those living in urban areas.

Take the example of an elderly couple where the husband dies, and the husband would have driven the car as the lady does not drive. Immediately, the income is cut, the costs are the same but the challenges in terms of transport and associated matters are more difficult. I can speak from my personal experience of visiting people in such situations. One lady whose husband had died was unable to turn the tap off in her kitchen within months of living alone, so she had to call the gardaí to the house to turn it off. This actually happened. These are the challenges that face people who would have had an inter-dependency with a partner with whom they had lived.

Regarding migration, I worked on a conference in Tinahely in Wicklow. I was instrumental in setting it up. It is a small village but it has a huge rural catchment area. It was set up by elderly people who wished to do something in their community. They discovered that the need in their community was not the financial need that members of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul so often address, so they moved their efforts to establishing a community centre, bringing people to it and engaging in various activities. One of the most sought after activities was to become skilled with IT. Again, this is a migration matter because people's families had moved away and they could not do simple things such as use Skype and send e-mails. That was hugely successful. On that subject, the society has invested in a large youth development scheme. We work with children in secondary schools who set up conferences on a similar basis to the senior conferences we use to help people in the community. A large part of the work they do is working with senior citizens to help them with IT and e-mails to connect with relations, as well as showing them how to use Facebook and showing them how useful it can be to connect to relations who live around the world. In addition, many of the projects they embarked on would be historical projects, where they map out a person's life, where they lived and the differences in the types of challenges they faced when they were young. The young people are very surprised when they see that the challenges were hard, but often they find that the modern challenges young people face are harder when they compare their lives to the lives of the older people they talk about and interview.

The transport issue arises all the time. People struggle when they receive appointments at short notice through the post. We are often called upon to provide financial assistance for people who must ask a neighbour to drive them to an appointment or bring them into town. Sometimes it can be a considerable cost. The personal contact we provide when we visit people, whether it is in rural or urban areas, is essential. We get an exact picture because people tell us what they are feeling and what their situation is. We regard that as a privilege and it is something we use for our social justice advocacy as well.

On the seniors alert scheme, we have evidence of people being unable to renew their monitoring facility due to lack of income. We have had to intervene in some of those cases.

I could speak all day on experiences of inadequate home help. In one situation an individual with no legs who was confined to a wheelchair had grossly inadequate home help. This individual had to clean out his fireplace onto his lap, wheel himself to the door and scatter the ashes outside the door.

I thank Deputy Danny Healy-Rae for his compliments to my colleagues in Kerry. I will pass them on to them.

In addition, we have experience of dealing with people in the LGBT community. We helped with funding towards providing a community centre for the LGBT community in Galway. I met with the individuals who were prominent in setting that up and I listened to their stories. A number of the people I spoke to came from rural areas and had migrated to the town because they had struggled in those rural areas. That said, there are still difficulties for that community in urban areas, especially where they congregate to meet, interact and support each other.